How is supply chain of companies with the advancement of technology?

Rida A., I am not a supply chain expert. I've worked on several ERP engagements where supply chain activities were involve and required attention from a process improvement point of view. I think the relationship , coordination of events, and communications between vendors and customers are extremely important today given the expectations around a quick time to market. From my Analytics studies, I will add that you my consider where supply chain will benefit from the technologies that will evolve from the Internet of Things (IoT). I think this area will help enhance your current work around networking. You may consider asking questions about how the IoT can be leveraged within supply chain. It should be coming soon. I wish you well with your endeavors.

I too have been in the supply chain for some time (1978) so I have seen a huge evolution in the tools available to manage the supply chain. In today's world, the more a person knows about the current technologies and how to utilize them would be a huge benefit to anyone entering the job market. In my opinion, if you have the time and flexibility, it would be a good idea to minor in the technologies as you mention.

I would also mention that another option would be to look at some of the certifications available in the Supply Chain industry. These certifications are available in many colleges as courses or as on line or self study platforms. I would recommend looking at CSCMP (Certified Supply Chain Management Professional) or CSCP as options. APICS supports some of these as well as the professional organizations: ISM, SMP, etc. An on line search for supply chain will highlight several of these and they typically will have a local chapter which you can join and begin your professional networking.
Networking is often overlooked as an entry point to the industry but I believe it needs to be included in anyone's career plan. Find out if there is a local chapter of one of these orgs and get involved if at all possible and you will get a boost from not only the networking, but also a great addition to your resume. Good luck!

I would suggest looking into data science along with supply chain. Data is the only thing that will drive your day to day decisions as a supply chain associate. For example looking into demand in certain country for your company's products and finding the best shipping route based on import/export cost. Look into getting certified into SAS, R, Python. These are languages that will help you interact with data. 

Market volatility is increasing and supply chains can respond, but they cannot sense. They are slow to adapt.

Over the course of the last year, I have written about this extensively. The research that I have conducted has enabled me to look at this holistically. For me, this has been discovery.

I am an old gal. Like an artifact, I have kicked around in the supply chain space since the 1980s. I believed that the first generation of supply chain systems would improve operations to a greater degree than actually happened. As an analyst, I had predicted great things that did not happen. Recently, I did a mea culpa. I am sorry.

As a result, I am trying to be more careful to not overhype the market. When I left AMR Research I invested over 400K in building a database of supply chain financial ratios to correlate supply chain results. My goal is to understand the impact of technologies and processes. It is easier said than done. After three years of research, I have just refined the methodology to start to pull the trends.

I have learned that supply chain systems are more complex than I originally thought, and that the relationships between supply chain metrics are nonlinear. I have also learned that you need a large data pool to derive the type of analysis that I want to publish. It takes more than one or two respondents from a company.

I need to finish the work, but in the process—like the Hippocratic Oath above—I want to do no harm.

Why It Matters

Today, we have a number of burning platforms. Recently, I spoke to a major European retailer that lost 5% of their grocery revenues to Amazon in the first quarter of 2014. It is clear to them that Amazon is going to be anything that they want to be, and that they need to defend their turf. In a similar vein, a major 3PL that I spoke to last week at Eye for Transport is considering discontinuing the traditional storage of spare parts and initiating a new service to do 3D printing of parts on demand. There are many tipping points happening together, and companies want to know what can drive the greatest value.

What I See in the Data

In my work on the Supply Chain Index, I see that companies I recognize as doing network design well are rising faster on the list of the Supply Chain Index work. The network design technologies have changed a lot in the last decade. (I sometimes wonder if I should create a new class of technologies for the network design tools because they have changed so much.) The older tools from CAPS Logistics, SNO from Oracle, and Manugistics Network Planning are giving way to new technologies like the Logictools product (purchased from IBM), the Solvoyo product for concurrent planning, the Quintiq technology for concurrent optimization, and the Llamasoft technology platform for optimization and simulation.

These technologies are applicable to solve many problems. These tools allow us to look at sell, source, make, and deliver together. They also enable the evaluation of networks for both sales and procurement relationships to optimize the flows upstream and downstream. The technologies enable the evaluation of both volumetric flows and cost. And optimization, as well as simulation, can now be done together.

I am a big fan of the use of these types of technologies. The work on the Supply Chain Index shows me that the companies that I consider to be the most mature in the use of these technologies—General Mills, Intel, Cisco, and Seagate—are outperforming their peers. Is it coincidence? I don’t think so. I think that it matters.

Next week I will be speaking at the Llamasoft Summercon conference (follow this link to see the slides). On October 15th, I will be speaking on the Qunitiq World Tour in Philadelphia. Along the way, I will be doing more work on network design case studies. In preparation for these speeches, I have recently completed some quantitative research on network design. Here I share a cut of the data.